


Shackleton Was Wrong

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Alien vs Predator (2004)
Genre: F/M, Xeno, Yautja
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:31:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fix-it fic, of a sort.  Scar is hardier than he looks, and Lex is drawn to the true 'last great journey left to man'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shackleton Was Wrong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cthonical (Nellie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nellie/gifts).



> Merry Yuletide! I hope this brings a smile to you on Christmas morning! Lex and Scar are a tricky one, but oh, I really wanted to see them ride off into the.. er, sunset... sort of... at the end. I couldn't resist!

The mountain air tasted cold and thin.  It clawed at Lex’s lungs at every breath, even through the respirator, and threatened to ice her eyelashes together when she blinked.  The storm was coming doggedly forward, crawling across the plain with fists of snow and ice chips. In another three hours, it would be scouring the mountain face, and Lex with it.    
  
Here and now with the wind keening to her bones and the sky so frigidly clear, Lex remembered.    
  
 _Shackleton called Antarctica the last great journey left to man.  It’s the one place left in the world that no one owns.  It’s completely free._  
  
She remembered the words more than the faces.  Faces were starting to fox at the edges, made dull by distance and by the short association of only a few days, taking the names with them like worn-off adhesive tags.  ‘S’-something... Sergio?  Sebastian.  Yes.  What was his last name?  She’d forgotten his last name, or if he’d even mentioned it, or if she’d read it in one of the files on that long-ago helicopter ride.    
  
It didn’t hurt, because Lex never let herself dwell on it.  There were other things that demanded her concentration and her skills, and ghosts wouldn’t keep her feet sure or her hands tight on her axes.  She was working.  She had to move.    
  
The sky blazed orange overhead as deep blue clouds churned up from the south.  Lex’s path was nothing more than a thread, and a thread taking her directly toward a frozen waterfall at that.  Waves of ice sagged down the mountain face and tapered to bladed points thicker around than Lex was tall.  They moaned when the wind gusted, vibrating up the shafts of the ice axes and into her bones.  She focused on the music of it, braiding the sound into the steady rhythm of her respirator, her heart, and the chime of her crampons stabbing into the ice to give her another inch, another six inches, another step closer to the top. 

The music paused as her next stretch brought a flaw on the ice to her eye.  A three-pointed gouge stabbed deeply into the otherwise flawless white, its sides smooth with the memory of body heat. 

Lex frowned, even as her heart accelerated with excitement.  She tongued a tab on the inside of her mask to trigger a different vision setting.  The white field of ice plunged into frigid black, save for a faint blue-green glow of the claw-marks.  They were still warm.

Her prey was close.

 

\---

 

The Antarctic cold had long soaked past her thin thermal clothes and into her bones.  Her hair hung in stiff ropes with frozen sweat.  The fires from the earlier explosion were dying into darkness.  Without proper clothing, Lex would have frozen to death in the snow cat in less than half an hour.  Getting back to the _Piper Maru_ before then was unlikely.  Lex’s thoughts felt dizzy, pulse and breath winding down in her ears, her adrenaline stores running dry and threatening to send her crashing to the ice.  When was the last time she’d eaten?  Slept?  _Hypothermia_ , she recognized groggily.  _Moderate to severe at this point._   

At least it kept her from running when the other hunters and their ship appeared in a shimmering of air.  That, and the warmth radiating from the open ship door.

The gift of the ornate spear… that could have meant anything.  A lifetime jammed with travel and survival loaned a little insight into anthropology, but hell if any of it was pertinent to this situation.  She took the intricately decorated haft with one hand (she wasn’t shivering anymore, a bad sign), feeling the weight and the balance together, and wondered if it was functional or symbolic, if it was meant as a prize for the hunt or possibly as trade for the wounded alien warrior at her back.    
  
Lex had taken to calling it _Scar_ in her head, and _him_ , though she tried not to dwell on that.  She tried not to pinpoint exactly when the shift had happened during her time in the pyramid, or why.    
  
The grizzled one, Lex called it _Elder_ , made a small gesture, a single click from its fearsome face instead of that rattling-waterfall of breaths, and two other hunters stepped up with a massive shape carried between them.  It was black, malevolently pointed with spines and ice, still tangled with chains... and very clearly dead.  The neck was severed messily, like a blackened branch crushed and twisted by a massive foot… or a falling water tank.  Half or Scar’s spear still protruded from the skull.  
  
Elder made a comment to Scar, the taloned fingertips tapping thoughtfully at the matching mark on his helmet.  More hunters were beckoned to help carry Scar to the ship, with the queen serpent’s skull at his side.  His bloody head sagged toward her as the stretcher carried him past, and his fingers dragged across some small charm of technology clipped to his belt. 

Lex tried not to start as her own voice, electronically distorted, parroted back at her.  “ _Hey!  I’m coming with you, do you hear me, you ugly creature?_ ”

Go with him?  Lex staggered forward a step before her thoughts caught up and gripped her with cold-numbed hesitation.  Had he meant that, or were the words only gibberish to him?  She looked over her shoulder at the dimming crater that Weyland’s expedition had wrought.  Would she survive the drive back to the icebreaker?  To civilization?

Did she _want_ to?  What would happen then?

She knew full well what would happen.  The next explorer, the next CEO would rear their head, their checkbook, and try to buy her expertise.  There would always be the next great adventurer, crawling over the bodies to plant a flag, to make a mark.  Like Stafford plucking her from Lho-La with his helicopter, like the trash littering Everest’s slopes, Shackleton had been so very wrong.   

 _The last place no one owns_ , she remembered with a swell of bitterness.  _Yeah.  Right_. 

 

\---

 

Lex found more claw marks as she neared the crest of the waterfall, marks of three in a long, undulating path of six limbs.  No blood – yet – but there was a new smell filtering into her respirator along with the recycled air, which meant she was _very_ close.  It was a little like mildew, like swamp water left out in the sun, which, considering the surroundings, struck Lex as more than a little ludicrous. 

The ice shuddered as she hauled herself over the edge.  It wasn’t the top of the mountain, not even close.  When the planet was closer to the twin-sun center of this system, the waterfall was fed by a broad river.  Now, Lex faced down a cathedral of ice, a blade-edged valley of caves that stretched several klicks before her and several again toward the sky.  The wind was louder, here, even though the gusts were gentled by stalagmites and smaller falls arcing from the walls.  Vision and scent were the only senses she could trust.  Lex tabbed the mask again to intensify sensitivity to heat.

There.  Footprints, still yellow-warm, weaving deeper into the canyon with a curving smear of its belly dragging low. 

Lex sheathed one axe and pulled the spear from its place on her back netting.  Her crampons pricked musically at the ice, turning every step into a careful balancing act.

The emptiness of the valley felt like a held breath.  The cold had frozen everything, even the crawl of the sun across the sky, and Lex had somehow swung loose to walk the ice alone.  

In her old life, she’d never actively pinpointed the precise moment where ‘vacation’ and ‘isolation’ clicked together to mean the same thing.  Perhaps it was inevitable.  Perhaps Mount Ranier had started it, like pebbles of snow falling down a slope.  The incident on The Sorcerer in Alberta with an overconfident liar of a then-boyfriend certainly made a fissure, rumbling.  The ice-climbing community was tighter than outsiders might guess, and every tragedy, every fall, every vacation gone wrong had twisted something in Lex’s chest when she tried to consider something _fun_ by her standards.    
  
By twenty-five, Lex had stopped trying.  
  
She was lucky neither Stafford nor Weyland called bullshit after she was fetched from Nepal, alone.  Yes, she was breaking her own rules, but if she ever allowed herself to examine the hypocrisy in detail, the facts were plain.  But a handful of people in the world had her standards.  No casual friend, no Internet-plucked love interest could keep up.  Seven seasons on the ice had taught Lex every limit of the human body.  She knew its frailties, its fears, its fault lines, just as intimately as she knew the rock, the ice, the cold.  She knew the human mind as it would react in fear, and she knew the inexorable push and claw of a storm.  Flesh and bone would always fail first; if not her, then someone along for the trip, someone she was supposed to protect.    
  
Alone, Lex had no one to worry about but herself, nothing but faith in her own mortal limits, and no one to fall prey to her own idea of a challenge.  It was peaceful that way.  
  
It wasn’t safe, and it was lonely, but the peace had been the best she could do.

Before.

The churn of clouds to the south caught up with the sun’s glow, painting shadows across the valley’s maze of crystalline razor blades.  The darker tones through Lex’s mask were a few seconds behind, leaving her momentarily blinded among the pillars of ice.

Lex smelled the gust of swampy breath and turned, the tines of her spear leaping out in full splay.  The creature had already committed to a leap, but had clearly not expected the jagged blades, and flailed to change direction with only minimal success.  Three claws and several fistfuls of hair-thin tentacles severed themselves on the blades as it twisted, spraying steaming-hot fluid.  It shrieked like shearing metal.  The shaggy, serpentine body folded in on itself and the horse-like head bared its flat, crushing teeth with deadly lower tusks.  The skin flushed bright red with rage.  Wounded, it was no longer prey.

Lex was already running deeper into the maze.

 

\---

 

Nearly a year passed from Bouvetoya before Lex saw Scar again.  Despite the gesture that convinced Lex to come, Elder had sent the hunters with Scar down one corridor, tapping demonstratively at his torso to mirror Scar’s wound.  Lex was guided to another space, a living quarters with a too-large bed and a spiked wall for her future prizes.

She’d not expected to be alone.  Then again, she would have been alone if she’d stayed on the ice, too; alone and waiting for the next trespassing lawsuit, the next philanthropist wanting to hug a penguin, the next parent-child that wanted to climb Ranier. 

Lex took the hunters.

Healing was private among the hunters.  Whenever Lex saw one wounded, or thought back to the sight of Scar spread out on the snow in a spray of glowing green blood, it was rather fitting to observe that hunter flesh didn’t have veins.  Their blood didn’t pulse out in time with a panicked heart, and didn’t clot to hard scabs.  It gelled only, as if a hunter’s body was loath to bleed. 

Nearly a year, and he returned to the training arena to an uproar of bellows and shrieks.  For a moment, Lex looked up and swore Scar was looking directly at _her_ from across the steamy, orange-lit space.  In the constant crush of hunters around the ring of the arena, Lex had been unable to get close, but she recognized him immediately from the mark on his brow, the shape of his mandibles.    

The serpent queen’s tail had missed Scar’s spine, but only just.  Lex couldn’t guess what other internal damage was done instead, but he survived.  She saw the mark through his body mesh, thick and gnarled like a burn, paler on his pale belly and back.  He’d lost weight in convalescing.  Muscles still corded his body, but it was a leaner, harder strength than Lex had first known.  He walked with the slightest of limps, the healed muscles twisting his posture into a barely significant lean, but he was as lethal as before. 

Scar matched Elder in a public fight, and Elder returned to him the planed mask of the other active hunters.  From then on, Scar led group and training hunts with his share of the queen’s skull covering his claw arm, the segmented macinae armor taking advantage of the skull’s distinct crest and shape. 

Lex was not invited to attend.  She refused to let it feel like neglect or abandonment.  Elder had made the situation clear: Lex was neither a hunter nor a warrior.  Her most valuable role was that of guide and scout.  Her excursions were needed to map and catalogue new prey on untested worlds of cold and ice with the mature hunters. 

However, she still felt a void of Scar’s company, now that she knew he’d survived.  In the brief time they’d known each other on Bouvetoya, the unexpected partnership had felt instinctive and equal.  Easy.  Right.  She missed that simplicity.  None of the other hunters, not even Elder, matched it, no matter how many planets she mapped, how many glacier predators were now in their databases due to her help.  No matter what the mark on her cheek bought her, she was not their equal.

It was soon challenged.

The hunter before Lex reminded her very much of Stafford.  Not roll of his accented voice, and not the dark, level stare; she distantly remembered the argument, the glaring and the puffing of chests over guns in the pyramid.  The setting of the map room in a hunter ship was new, and the disgust was leveled at her _species_ instead of her gender, but it was strange how that attitude of machismo came across all the same.   
  
Lex was the alien.  The outsider.  Lex was the threat to the control of the plan, and the hunter refused to look at the scar on her cheek.

She stood alone, but Lex held her ground.  She held up her hand, fingers spread wide.  The gloves gave her claws like them, little bone shields on her knuckles like them, and she had five fingers like them.  _Two_ , she signed clearly.It was a matter of resources and practicality, and knowing who she could trust at her side as a scout.  She would take only one hunter with her, and to drive home her point, Lex turned and pointed to the chosen hunter amid the pack ringing the map room – Scar.  

 _Two_ , she signed again.  She pointed to the map, circling the sector of layered ice.  Not for the first time, Lex wished her throat had the capacity to repeat the clicks and guttural croaks of the hunter language.  Silent hand signs hobbled any attempt to offer reason to her argument, reasons like weight, experience, and the threat of rotting ice with discoloration shown on the aerial images.  The planet needed patient mapping and scouting, with a hunter that had at least _seen_ ice, and not a hotheaded hunter in search of a new skull.  Stafford would come with the others, once ground scouting was complete.

The oppressively humid heat of the ship leaned on her, an extension of Stafford’s angry snarl as he loomed threateningly. 

 _Two_.  Even in this terrifying new life, Lex knew ice.  They did not.  Elder recognized that, respected that.  The hunters’ heat-tolerant equipment had to be carefully recalibrated, and their camouflage would not work in snow.  This was difficult and exotic to their usual choice of hunt.

Stafford bellowed with insult and shoved her, stiff-armed.  Even with her armor on, he outweighed her three times over, and Lex skidded back into the wall with a crack, winded.  Breathing, though, had no bearing on the flex of her wrist and the answering snap of blades that shot obediently forward over her knuckles. 

Lex knew better than to try fighting back, and not just as a matter of being physically smaller and weaker than a full-grown hunter.  She needed to prove her point, else she’d only present herself as an obstacle to be knocked down by the next hunter with an ego to show.

The hunters valued strength and fearlessness, but Lex knew they could also appreciate cleverness. 

As Stafford pulled his own blades, Lex dropped to her knees and rolled out of reach to the side.  She came up quickly and vaulted onto the map table itself.  As far as she could guess, the plate covering the pedestal wasn’t anything like glass, but instead a thin, solid slab of alien crystal, and as a result, _fragile_.  Under the hisses and clicks of the hunters in the room, particularly from Captain, the plate groaned at Lex’s weight.  The projections stuttered and wavered.

Stafford _almost_ vaulted up to meet her.  The moment he placed his hand on the plate and started to push, a deep crack stitched through the crystal and killed a ragged chunk of the projection.  Elder snarled a sharp warning, and the seething hunter froze.

Lex stood her ground.  _Two_ , she signed. She pointed at the creaking plate, then the remaining projection of the terrain.  _Two only._

Stafford’s eyes glittered coldly.  He backed away, but Lex watched his brows draw together as a new train of thought arose.  He barked something that was certainly an insult, flaring his mandibles in Scar’s direction while jerking his head at Lex.  His outstretched hand mimed taking Lex’s skull, then crushing it with a flick of his fingers.

… _what was that supposed to mean?_  

 

\---

 

Lex sprinted as fast as her awkward crampons would allow.  They sent shockwaves of impact up to her knees and into her teeth with every step, but they were similar enough to the creature’s feet to give her a little bit of advantage in cornering sharply around snowdrifts and jagged stalactites. 

Teeth snapped shut less than a hand’s length from her hair.  Lex twisted her next step and hooked her ice axe around the edge of one of the pillars.  Her momentum turned sharply to the side where the creature carried itself forward.  She gained two seconds of a lead, but had to leave one of the crampons behind in the ice. 

A little further.  Lex’s lungs burned with cold as much as her skin tingled with adrenaline.  She feinted left, skidding with her one naked boot, and sprinted down a narrower passage.

A bellow like a crocodile’s roar cut through the wind and storm, and Lex smiled beneath her mask. 

The frozen lake cracked and threw powdered ice up into the air as Scar landed in a low crouch behind the creature with his wrist blades ready, cutting off the only exit.  Scar had taken a perch high on one of the ice sheets pouring from the side of the mountain, far above the creature’s eye level.  It was not a valley.  The frozen spring that fed the river in warmth was a box canyon, and Lex had flushed, then drawn her prey squarely to where the lid could be snapped shut. 

Lex turned and took up her own stance with spear and axe.  Her voice sounded alien and wild through her mask, rising up against the razor walls of the canyon in a sound more primal than any language she’d left behind.

 

\---

 

Scar sought her out in the armory on the day before their two-hunter expedition was to leave.  The hunter ships were kept warm as a jungle, and about as humid.  She needed the mask to breathe deeply, but Lex stayed otherwise stripped down to a fabric band across her chest and a kilt that let _some_ air circulate over her sweaty skin.  The spring on her wrist blades needed replacing.  It was a constant ritual of maintenance, and one rather like checking her ropes and pitons in her previous life.  The familiarity of physics, of wear and care for tools, was soothing.

Scar walked directly up to her and placed a long string of sharp objects on her workstation.  He tapped at the shiny black serpent-skull armor on his arm, Lex’s stomach gave a slight jump as she recognized the queen serpent’s teeth, neatly pulled from the skull all the way down to the root. 

Sharing? 

Lex was grateful for the mask, as it hid her confused frown.  Elder had awarded that kill to Scar.  Hunters never shared, and she’d seen far too many hunters come to blows over identifying the killing shot of a prized prey.  Lex took one, testing the tip with her finger.  The weight was lighter than the metal blades, and felt sharper, too.

Scar inclined his head, an assessing once-over as he’d done when he gave her the spear and serpent-head shield so long ago.

Not sharing, Lex guessed.  Equalizing?  Or, as Scar hesitated, reached for her blades and caught himself… was it something more?   

It was dim in the chamber, with the wall lights offering illumination in every shade of molten orange, but there was a telling glitter hiding in the deep shadows of his face.  The mask’s field of vision threatened to play tricks.  Lex couldn’t quite tell where his eyes focused on her, if they lingered on her body with its thinness, its alien curves, or something else.  After a moment, he turned on his heel and left.

Lex had seen what she guessed was a female hunter all of once.  Elder’s ship had met with another, and among the visitors was the tallest hunter Lex had ever seen, with dreadlocks of light brown and reddish freckles on the usual pale skin.  The gold-edged armour was a new style to Lex’s eyes, shaped to protect what looked like _breasts_ on the upper chest.  The other hunters stayed well away from the newcomer’s path, but howled and chattered for attention, weapons out and ornamental skulls rattling. 

The female had looked at none of them as she passed.  Lex could smell the reek of masculine disappointment.   
  
When Lex closed her eyes, she could still see that one moment where the Scar had attacked from above, perfect and lethal.  She remembered the shudder in the air as his spear slammed home through the serpent queen’s head.  Already bloody and battered, but _fighting_ to the last--  
  
Lex breathed.  She needed to concentrate.  The spring was a sensitive mechanism, and Lex had no want to lose a finger. 

But she wondered, and she _wanted_ , still.

 

\---

 

The new prey did not go down easily.  Its long, serpentine body was difficult to outflank, and side-set eyes gave it a wide range of vision.  The colorless blood oozing from its wounds was similar to a natural antifreeze, and turned the lake surface slippery in dangerous places. 

In the end, Lex’s wrist blades, the new serpent teeth glinting in the icy light, punched up through the underside of the creature’s jaw, pinning its mouth shut inches from Scar’s mask.  It trumpeted its pain through its bony crest, hauling Lex from her feet as it thrashed and blindly tried to find her in its thick beard.  That moment of distraction was all the opening Scar needed to turn, draw his machete, and bring the blade down on the creature’s neck with killing force and an ice-shattering roar. 

The head and body fell with separate crunches to the ice. 

Lex wrenched her blades free, her shoulder burning with strain.  She and Scar stood for a moment in silence, blood dripping from their blades as their shoulders heaved with breath.  They’d lived.  Lex’s thoughts snagged that far and no further.  They’d _lived_ ; two sharp-edged specks on a bare and unclaimed world, no flags or fences, nothing but the blades in their hands, the cold air in their lungs, and the skull at their feet. 

Lex turned, and Scar was watching her again.  Clouds of warm air gusted from the vents of their masks, and Lex shivered for reasons other than the cold.

The adrenaline reminded her of champagne and thin air.   

Lex didn’t think about it.  She’d never thought about it; like staring up at an unconquered mountain, she’d _not_ let her nerve be rationally unpacked into fear.   

Walking lopsidedly over the ice, she planted her bared boot on Scar’s upper thigh.  She climbed him like a wall, straightening her leg so they could look each other in the eye through their masks.  She deliberately slid her leg up the front of his armor, her knee grinding up the plates covering his groin.  Scar’s answering rattle made her nerves shiver with that fight-and-flight reflex still sensitive from the kill.  There would always be a part of Lex’s body that insisted she should be _afraid_ of Scar, but as his arm folded around her and pressed claws to the vulnerable nape of her neck, Lex felt that fear twist on itself into exhilaration, into arousal.

His warm skin felt how Lex imagined a dragon’s skin might feel: dark, pebbled scales and smooth hide over steel-hard muscle.  Many times, Lex tried to find another metaphor, some earthly comparison for the scent of him, the way proximity to his breath made a taste sit at the back of her tongue, but there was always a giddy tingle in her palms when she failed.  There was nothing in her repertoire to explain him, save for how her body reacted.  

The releases of their masks snapped and spat air as Lex worked them free.  The atmosphere wasn’t perfect, but enough of the heavier toxins weren’t present at this altitude, and Lex _wanted_ this, needed to know with clarity if this was why Scar singled her out.

Placing her hands on either side of Hunter’s head, Lex leaned in near.  So many sharp teeth.  No tongue.  No lips.  No safe place to put her mouth, but she licked her lips in anticipation all the same.  She leaned in just shy of those cage-like mandibles and _inhaled_.  Her back arched, her chest sliding up his torso, the animal gesture needing no translation.  That scent, neither musk nor sweat nor human breath but _something_ exotic and beckoning, it made her eyes half-close and her own breath shudder out.    
  
Scar’s breath rattled softly in return.  The mandibles unfurled to clasp her face, the tips digging in just enough to feel sharp on her cheekbones and jawline. 

Lex smiled, baring teeth back.  

 _Let Shackleton have Antarctica_ , she mused.  This was free, and this was _hers_.  


End file.
